Bruce Mancinelli, whose diverse background includes pitching for the 1960s-era Chicago Cubs during spring training, sales and marketing for IBM, and being at the helm of 5 companies over the past 25 years, describes himself as a “6.0 guy in a Web 2.0 world”.  Prior to signing on as President and CEO of Mentations, Inc. in 2007, Mancinelli was CEO of WebSurveyor Corporation, which he grew into a mature company recently acquired by Austin Ventures.   

Mentations founder Brian Schneeberg first developed its “Personal Intelligence Agent” software, which monitors and provides customized information from the Internet, in 2002, and is responsible for defining and implementing its service architecture and delivery mechanisms.  He has 15 years of consulting experience -- 13 of them in IS -- and currently serves as a consultant to the Department of Homeland Security.  

Amplifier:  What does your company do?   

Mancinelli:  Mentations, Inc. tackles the growing problem of information overload by delivering information at a glance via 'dynamic pictures'.  Technically speaking, this means that it uses Ambient Information Visualization (AIV) in the form of informative art to depict how you are doing in relation to your net-driven life.   

Amplifier:  What problem does it solve? 

Mancinelli: A user initially chooses a dynamic picture/theme to use as their interface from a number of choices (or they can create their own from scratch) along with its visual and audio characteristics that best fit their personality or profile.  Information can then be collected from any number of places and presented as a single, consolidated view. 

For instance, you may have a bouquet of wildflowers as your Mentations interface, each flower representing an area of your life.  Perhaps the daisy represents your finances and if it wilts your checking account balance is getting low. 

Further, Mentations has the capability for meta-actions to be embedded init.  So for instance, you could drag a virtual watering pot over the daisyto instruct the software to transfer a preset sum of money from your savings to checking, thereby making the daisy (and you) happy.  

Amplifier: What is unique about your company? 

Mancinelli: We are unique by virtue of our visually-oriented way of representing a lot of information in an easily digestible format.  Mentations allows users to define the information they are interested in tracking, and the way that Mentations enables users to monitor the "pulse" of that information. 

Amplifier: When did you start your company? 

Schneeberg: The company was started towards the end of 2002.  Much effort has gone into the development of a robust platform that is now ready to be packaged for commercial use. 

Amplifier: How have you funded the company to date? 

Mancinelli:  To date, the company has been self-funded - no outside investors. 

Amplifier:  At what stage of development is your company? 

Schneeberg:  The company has been doing R&D and is now at the point of having a public beta of the Mentations software available for download.  We are hoping to have a fully browser-based solution as well by first quarter of next year. 

Amplifier:  What is your biggest current challenge? 

Mancinelli:  As with many startups, we face the Herculean task of getting a lot accomplished in a short period of time with very little funding.Additionally, as the web 2.0 Internet space has exploded with so muchactivity, small companies like Mentations, Inc. are constantly vying formarket awareness and reach to new customers. 

Amplifier:  What would you be doing if you weren't an entrepreneur? 

Schneeberg:  I’ve always had an entrepreneurial bug.  Hopefully, we’d be involved in implementing a Mentations-like interface for a commercial client since we believe that the technology that Mentations utilizes and the capabilities it delivers will be pervasive in the near future.  

Mancinelli:  While it is hard to imagine not being entrepreneurs, we'd probably be doing software development/consulting for someone else. In any event, we’d probably be looking around to see how to improve something in our every day, net-driven lives. There is always a better way of doing something.

Bruce and Brian both live with their families in the Northern Virginia area and are active in their local churches and a variety of local organizations, including the Virginia Public Schools and the Greater Reston Chamber of Commerce.